Day in Engineering History Archive - March 21

March 21

1768: Mathematician
Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Fourier was born. 1861: The Constitution
of the Confederate States of America established a Patent Office.
1877: French aircraft designer
Maurice Farman was born. 1915: American inventor and engineer
Frederick Taylor, known as the father of scientific management,
was born. 1925:
Carl Eilers, the "Father of FM and TV Stereo," was born. 1942:
A secret report (held until after WWII was over) was submitted suggesting
the name "plutonium"
for artificial element 94 since it followed neptunium and uranium.
1965:
Martin Luther King, Jr. led the historic 54-mile civil rights
march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. 1963:
Alcatraz prison in San Francisco Bay was emptied of its last
inmates at the order of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. 1991:
Leo Fender, inventor of the first solid body electric guitar,
died. 1999: A balloon flown by
Brian Jones and Bertrand Piccard achieved the first non-stop
round-the-world balloon flight.

Note: These
historical tidbits have been collected from various sources, mostly on the Internet.
As detailed in this article, there
is a lot of wrong information that is repeated hundreds of times because most websites
do not validate with authoritative sources. On RF Cafe, events with
hyperlinks have been verified. Many years ago,
I began commemorating the birthdays of notable people and events with
special RF Cafe logos.
Where available, I like to use images from postage stamps from the country where
the person or event occurred. Images used in the logos are often from open source websites
like Wikipedia, and are specifically credited with a hyperlink back to the source where
possible. Fair Use
laws permit small samples of copyrighted content.

RF Cafe began life in 1996 as "RF Tools" in an AOL screen name web space totaling 2 MB.
Its primary purpose was to provide me with ready access to commonly needed formulas and reference
material while performing my work as an RF system and circuit design engineer. The Internet
was still largely an unknown entity at the time and not much was available in the form of
WYSIWYG ...

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